Unlike my Dad, I wouldn’t win many pub quizes, I can’t just pick up a guitar and get a decent tune out of it and I can’t tune things or harmonise by ear. But just like me Dad, god golly I love the music..
My Dad came of age when the Beatles starting making a noise and I don’t think any of us who weren’t around at the time will every fully appreciate the shift it what it was to grow up pre and post Beatlemania and the profound impact it had on the kids who saw it happen.
Like many kids at the time my Dad, his brother and a couple of mates formed a band. The guitars hanging on the wall and the playing of the pianos aren’t things I remember now and then; they are just things that are, so integral they are to my life.
You know when someone loves musics when, like my dad, they are open to all of it. We’d go on holiday in the big white van – a VW camper- and we’d all be able to pick some music to take.
Nothing was out of bounds. My wham tapes were allowed and there also be the Beach Boys, the Eagles, Eurythmics Queen, Terrorvision, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, Green day, Meatloaf, and more and more and more.
Dad was in a CD club at work. This meant a group of about 12 people who once a month would take it in turns to buy a CD. It would be past around all 12 people who would make a pirate tape copy of it and also listen to it and they’d compare notes on what they thought. Dad would listen to everything with an open mind and open ears and that attitude is one of the few things that made my tricky early teens a lot more bearable.
Each Sunday, we’d listen to the chart show all together. Passing judgement on which songs we liked and didn’t. It was never personal: never, ‘your taste is rubbish’. More just which things we liked and which things we didn’t and why and in that way it openned conversation,
Dad would listen out and tell me the weeks he thought it was worth me recording the charts. I’d sit there with my radio cassette player for a couple of hours, finger on the record button, capturing the best ones as they came on. I’ve still got some of those tapes in the garage.
My own music taste did, as a result, grow up eclectic and music is now something I listen to in order to enhance, not change, my mood. I know how to do angry music, sad music, joyous music. I love feeling things – the good and the bad – and I love how music is the salt and pepper that brings out the flavour of life.
I can’t tell you my favourite songs. There are some songs I never tire of: Fleetwood Mac’s You Make Loving Fun, Isley Brothers Summer Breeze, Donna Summers I Feel Love, INXS one of my kind, Pulp Babies..goodness…actually…there are lots…there’s not enough room to list them all.
So yes, I can’t tell you my favourite songs because there are too many to list here. But I can take you on a quick potted history of my music collection.
It started with Wham obvs, I was more a Wake me Up Before you Go GO Gal than a Wham Rap person, although Wham Rap is more my bag lately. I moved into Erasure and then I had a very strange period of listening to Dina Carol (when I thought that must be what love felt like) and Madonna’s Erotica when I thought that must be what sex felt like).
As I grew, I grew into the Levellers. They were my first proper concert where I went with cousins not parents. For my 16th birthday, some girls clubbed together and brought me Nirvana’s nevermind and that was not just a musical awakening but a personal one too: I started to realise I could belong. Music let’s you in like that.
Then there was Suede and pretty soon after I was knee deep in Britpop. As Brit pop died music felt a little shite for a while so I started discoveing classics like Blondie and Sade and got a little into soul and the like: angie stone, Lauren Hill. Erica Badou.
Now, I love the funk and soul vibes, northern soul, old skool 90s club and R&B (that I never cared for at the time but bloody love it now). Foo fighters appear often. Gah. I can’t list it all: if it’s on, and I’m in the mood for it, I’ll listen. Nothing’s off limits…although I do struggle with whiny men with guitars and overly-wharbling women.
There’s another shift now in how kids listen to music. I don’t get how to connect over it anymore. It feels so individual. So fleeting.
I love the access I have to any album on my streaming service but I miss sharing the art work and lyrcics from the CD box, thinking hard to choose, browsing the rack. I miss listening to the chart show with someone who wasn’t there to judge but who was just there for the music.
Cogito Ergo Mum 